


doubt and desolation

by sylvansalvia



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Unrequited Love, canon-typical amounts of arson and such or possibly slightly less, fire girls......., not like a happy ending but like an ambiguously hopeful one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22122640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylvansalvia/pseuds/sylvansalvia
Summary: Somewhat against her will, Jude finds an anchor in Agnes. She doesn't notice it until her savior begins to doubt.
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Jude Perry, Jude Perry & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Agnes was the light. There was no other way to say it. One heartbeat after Jude realized this, she realized how blasphemous the thought truly was. Jude joined the Lightless Flame because of things like power and sacrifice, words that scorched her tongue when she tried to speak them. She joined because the only way she knew how to escape the depression that had settled over her was to burn her way out of it. She joined because she was born with heat in her lungs and blood simmering in her veins, and she did not want to keep her fire contained. Cruelty appealed to her, somehow. It was better than nothing.

  
For a little while, Jude was convinced that she sacrificed her humanity for these reasons alone. Conviction was good for her. It made fine fuel for the Desolation. Then, one day, she turned to look at Agnes.

  
Agnes was washing dishes, of all things. Sunlight streamed through the open window and turned the clouds of billowing steam to molten gold. It set the crown of her head alight, turning her wispy auburn hair to a halo of crushed topaz. Her lips looked indescribably soft, and the familiar scent of matches and incense made Jude feel faint. Everything shone.  
Suddenly, Jude noticed that she felt the same in that moment as she did when she first joined the Desolation— as when she met Agnes. She felt warm. A gentle heat spread from her wax heart to her fingertips, and her knees were weak. Worst of all, she felt safe.

  
Jude Perry didn’t say you’re beautiful. She didn’t say _you look happy_ or _I want you to be happy_ or _I joined the Desolation because I wanted you to smile at me like you smiled at the others, small and proud and affectionate and possessive._ These things, though true, were not what she was supposed to say to her messiah. This was not how she was supposed to love destruction incarnate.  
Agnes glances at her. Her gaze felt like flames brushing painlessly across Jude’s skin. Her fingertips tingled.

  
“Do I have something on my face?” Agnes says.

  
“What? No. I was just— thinking. About the Scoured Earth.”

  
She laughs, but there’s pain in her eyes. Jude watches her destiny settle heavily across her shoulders. Watches her tense, bowing slightly under the weight. Agnes scrubs dark residue from a wineglass until it gleams.

  
That moment in Agnes’ quiet flat ruins Jude. The thought of it weighs her down like an anchor. She can’t stop thinking about how Agnes has hair the color of a sunrise, or that her eyes seem to catch the light of the stars. In the beginning, Jude loved her for being as beautiful as a wildfire. Now, despite everything, she loves her for being as beautiful as a _hearth._

  
Jude doesn’t refer to the Desolation as the Lightless Flame very much anymore. The word _lightless_ feels cold and false in her mouth.

* * *

Eventually, the coffeeshop boy appeared. Jack Barnabas. Jude didn’t realize they were dating until they had been doing it for weeks. She wanted to burn something. For the first time in years, she dreamed about her own self-immolation. The smell of gasoline. Flames licking the inside of her ribs. When she first experienced it, it was joyful. Holy. In retrospect, it just hurt.

  
In the mirror, Jude considered her wax face. It looked like her, frozen in the moment when she set herself alight. Her skin was hot to the touch, flawless, and slightly translucent when the sun hit it, as though she were carved out of glass or quartz. She was so much softer than quartz.

  
For the very first time, Jude thought about reshaping her own face. After years of wearing a malleable body, she was a decent sculptor. She could have been Galatea come to life at last. She could be a beautiful thing, if she wanted to be.

  
Barnabas was fairly plain. Average features. Muddy eyes. A weak chin. There was a pimple at the base of his nose, just under his left nostril. It struck Jude that Agnes didn’t want a Galatea.

  
“What the hell do you see in him?” she asked Agnes, later that night.

  
Agnes stared into a candle flame. It reflected in her eyes, creating twin pinpricks of pure light. Her face seemed to have been carved from gold as the candlelight flickers on her skin.

  
“Just tell me,” Jude said.

  
A pause. “I want to fall in love,” Agnes said, so quietly that she seemed to be mouthing the words.

  
“What?” Agnes didn’t answer. “So you’re not in love with him.”

  
Agnes swallowed. Her hands were limp in her lap. “That’s not the point.”

  
“What’s the point, then?”

  
“Do you ever think about— about ordinary people?”

  
“Yes,” Jude said. “They’re pathetic. Just fuel for our fire. The only time they’re worth thinking about is when I plan their misery, their loss, their destruction, all for my god. For you.”

  
“They are pathetic,” Agnes repeated flatly. “But.”

  
“There’s a ‘but?’”

  
“Sometimes they’re happy.”

  
Jude didn’t have an answer for that. They both stayed silent for minutes, watching the candle burn itself down. Hot wax ran down its sides and pooled in bone-colored rivulets on the table. Before long, Jude knew, it would dissolve itself utterly into a broken pile of white.

  
“You won’t hurt him,” Agnes said suddenly.

  
Jude wanted that sentence to be a command. She wanted Agnes to stare at her with her spotlight eyes and say _I’ll destroy you if you hurt him._ But she didn’t. Instead, she put a hand on Jude’s wrist, a touch so soft it barely burned at all.

  
“Please, Jude,” Agnes said.

  
“Fine.”

  
Agnes sat back with a light kindling in her eyes. “Really?”

  
Jude nodded heavily. On the table, a little more of the candle collapsed into itself in the heat.

  
“As my god commands,” she said, and the words ached inexplicably as she said them.

* * *

Jude knew that Agnes didn’t love her back. She loved Agnes like she loved the house fires that she used to watch on TV. No one expects a mindless inferno to love them back, no matter how beautiful it might be. It was fine, really. It was _fine._ Jude didn’t join the Desolation for love.

  
Most of the time, she saw her at the cult meetings in a sea of things that looked like people. Agnes rarely proselytized. She just stood, still as a candle flame, as Arthur Nolan spoke about the glory of their patron. Her eyes flickered over the crowd of followers. Sometimes her gaze illuminated Jude, so strongly that Jude felt like it must be making her glow from within, a fiery light shining through her short dark hair and flashing from her fingertips. Then Agnes would move on to the next believer, and Jude would feel empty.

  
She never really listened to Arthur Nolan.

  
Afterwards, Agnes would sometimes walk quietly up to her to see how she was doing. She made a habit of checking on all the members of her cult. Jude wasn’t special.

  
“Good morning,” Agnes said, and waited for Jude to fill in the conversational gap.

  
Jude assumed Agnes wanted a report. “I found another sacrifice last night. An accountant. Two kids. I turned his bones to ash in a blaze of glorious fire.”

  
Agnes, who had been steadily looking at Jude’s face, glanced away.

  
“What’s the matter?”

  
That day, Agnes wore a somber gray jacket, the color of ashy charcoal. A cobweb hung from her left lapel, right over her heart. It was nothing more than a thin white filament, weak and barely visible, but the sight of it made Jude feel slightly sick.

  
“My connection to the Ceaseless Watcher is—” Agnes sighs, and places a hand over her heart. "I'm sorry."

  
“I’ll kill that Archivist myself,” Jude growls.

  
“Please don’t.”

  
“Why not?”

  
Agnes didn’t answer, and Jude felt a familiar sense of sick rage sweep through her body. It must be fear. Caution, maybe. Jude could accept no other reason why Agnes didn’t want Gertrude Robinson dead. Still, in quiet moments like this, she felt a sinking suspicion deep in the pit of her stomach that sometimes, Agnes doubted. And if Agnes doubted, what did that mean for Jude’s precious conviction?

“Please,” Agnes said again, and Jude’s heart broke a little. “Can we talk about something else? Something normal? Just this once?”

  
This was not how a messiah was supposed to act. Those words were not what she was supposed to say. Jude wanted to say that, to point out that Agnes was better than this, to remind her of the beauty of cruelty and the destruction of their patron. A long time ago, Agnes was the one that told her that the impulse to scorch was right, was _her_ , and Jude clung to that devotion and made it all that she was.

  
Jude forced herself to speak anyway. “I… I like your necklace. It’s pretty. Suits you.”

  
Agnes looked down, surprised. A thin chain circled her neck. Rose gold. There was a little charm at the base of her neck in the shape of a bird in flight. Its feathers were intricate filigree, its wings bright, its eyes tiny garnets.

  
“Thank you,” she said.

  
“What is it? Some kind of bird?”

  
“It’s a phoenix.”

  
There was something a little sacrilegious about that, Jude could tell. Agnes wore the idea that there was life after desolation on a little chain around her neck. It was an idea that Jude disagreed with, of course. If she could rise from the ashes, then what was the point?

  
The thought seemed to have occurred to Agnes, too, since she buttoned her coat up to the base of her throat. The little bird dipped out of sight.

* * *

After Agnes is gone and everything is cold and gray and ash, the little bird charm arrived in an envelope on Jade’s doorstep. Agnes’ handwriting, spidery by now, on the front. Jude didn’t even open it. She clutched it as she sat in a crumpled pile on the freezing bathroom tiles and tears boiled out of her eyes.

  
She didn’t even know she could still cry. The tears hit her hands as they fall. They bore into the wax like worms. Everything hurt. Jude was supposed to know loss, to know devastation. Her initiation into the cult of the Lightless Flame was designed to strip her of everything she had. She thought she knew what it felt like.

  
When she finally opened the envelope, the bird glinted in her palm. Filigree feathers. Garnet eyes. She watches it shine in the cold fluorescent light and resists the urge to reduce it to smoldering molten metal.


	2. Chapter 2

Several weeks before the apocalypse, Jude Perry passes the Archivist in the street. He recognizes her, of course, and hurries in the opposite direction, hunched over the scar on his hand. Then, improbably, he stops. He looks back. He walks over to her, purpose in his eyes. His fingers tremble, but his gaze is steady.

“Didn’t you learn your lesson the first time, Archivist?” she snarls.

His fingers twist around his scar, but his eyes flick smoothly from her wrists to her throat to her face. She shivers. His eyes are too bright for the gray evening, as if he is staring into a flame she cannot see.

“I thought so,” he says, ignoring her. He sounds almost startled. “You’ve found an anchor, haven’t you?”

Jude’s throat closes up and she feels her fingers curl into fists. His eyes are like spotlights. She wants to hurt him, to watch his flesh blister and blacken to the same color as his empty pupils.

“Who is it?” he asks, in a voice that is almost gentle.

“Stupid,” she says, “who else could it be but her?”

The Archivist sighs. Relief, maybe, or a simple release of breath. “Ah. Agnes,” he says. “I should have known.”

She wants to incinerate him for that attitude. He seems to think that the slow erosion of Jude’s faith and the dead weight dragging her down were inevitable from the start, Jude being Jude and Agnes being Agnes.  _ Of course _ she was Jude’s anchor. She wants nothing more than to burn that smug look off his face.

Except he doesn’t look smug. He looks exhausted, and there is something unfamiliar in his expression. Jude knows what fear looks like, has seen it carved into the lines of every face that appears before it, and this is something softer.

She wants to burn him, but she doesn’t. She just stands there, feet planted on the ash-colored sidewalk, unable to shake the feeling that London is turning to quicksand beneath her. Nothing feels solid anymore. The Archivist is looking at her with pity in his eyes, she realizes, and no one has looked at her like that in a very long time. He’s changed since they last met. He must have, since he’s able to look at her with more sympathy than terror.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s dead.”

“Of course it still matters. You know that.”

If Jude could, she would spit vitriol into his scarred face and soft eyes for that one. She can’t, though, and she tells herself that this is because his patron protects him.

“Come on,” he says.

He starts walking down the street, slow and determined. His footsteps barely make a sound. Jude stomps after him.

“Where are we going?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns down a smaller street with fewer people.

“Are you trying to make it easier for me to kill you? Trust me, I don’t need your help.”

“I don’t think you’ll kill me, Jude Perry. I don’t think you’ve fed your patron for a while.” He tilts his head, eyes catching the orange of a streetlight. “Three months, two weeks, and four days. Oh, and about seventeen hours. That, and it’s rather telling that Mr. Barnabas is still breathing.”

“You don’t know me,” she hisses. “You don’t understand anything. I’ll always serve the Desolation. I always have. No one— nothing else. When I catch that coffeeshop boy, I’ll sear his bones to ash with its glorious— its glorious— its beautiful destruction will—”

The Archivist stops short suddenly, and she trails off. They emerge from an alley onto a small island of sidewalk overlooking the Thames, which reflects all the lights of the city like stars. Above them, the sun is starting to set. A sliver of fading light dyes the horizon red.

“Do you mean  _ her _ beautiful destruction?” the Archivist asks, and she wants to slap him.

Instead, she shoves her fists into her pocket and watches the sunset with him. The water laps quietly against the concrete below. He isn’t looking at her. Instead, his gaze idly scans the opposite bank, looking at the dim streets and flickering streetlights. The message is clear. She doesn’t have to talk if she doesn’t want to talk.

“I like your necklace,” he says.

She lifts a hand up to touch it. The metal is cold against her skin, and bright, like a star torn from the sky and affixed to the base of her throat.

“Thank you,” she says, reluctantly. “It’s a—”

“I know. The symbolism seemed a little ironic.”

“It was hers. Did your patron tell you that?”

“No. I do possess a modicum of common sense, though. I’m not a total idiot without the Beholding.”

She laughs, but not unkindly. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

He leans on the railing, careful not to ask any questions. Below them, the ripples in the water catch the light and scratch stark shadows across the river’s surface.

“She was complicated,” Jude says. “I need you to know that. It wasn’t just whatever Gertrude did. She had real doubts from the very beginning. And she was— hell, none of us are good people, but she tried to be kind.”

Jon nods. Jude isn’t sure when she stopped thinking of him as the Archivist.

“By the end, I thought she was going to try to escape. You know, to stop being an avatar. I thought that was what the necklace thing was about, you know, like she wanted to be the phoenix rising from the ashes.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“Neither do I. These days, I’m not sure if that was really what she was thinking. Maybe,” Jude says, and pauses to wipe a hand across her eyes, “maybe she just wanted to be loved. To love someone, like ordinary humans do.”

“I don’t think you have to be human to love someone,” Jon says quietly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” Jude holds her sleeve over her eyes. The fabric sizzles.

The last residue of natural light in the sky fades as the sun slips below the horizon.

“Personally,” Jon says, voice slipping into something dry and professional, “I don’t think you can leave the Desolation and survive.”

Jude laughs, a pale imitation of herself. “Why would anyone want to?”

“But if you do,” he says more firmly. “If you do, well… good luck, Jude Perry.”

He holds out his scarred hand with the familiar air of someone doing something incredibly self-destructive. There is no challenge in his face, just a quiet, final determination. The message is clear.

Jude shakes his hand.

He pulls it back very quickly and checks his fingers for additional burns. Jude laughs. His hand is unharmed. He shoves it into his coat pocket and takes a few apprehensive steps back.

“Hurry up and leave before I change my mind,” she says.

He stumbles backwards and starts to walk away.

“Wait.” 

He turns. She hesitates, fiddling with the holes burned into her sleeve.

“Thank you,” she says. “You too. Good luck.”

Jon nods, and with several frantic glances over his shoulder to make sure she isn’t following, he walks away.

Jude raises a hand to her phoenix pendant. It glows warm and bright like an ember in the low light.

**Author's Note:**

> ok ok so basically as soon as jude and the idea of anchors were introduced i pulled out a skein of red string and started listening to hozier. unfortunately i have never had a coherent thought in my life so this is the result


End file.
